Day: September 3, 2012

The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that we’re slowing down on this series now that the new season is properly under way. We’ll work our way through the rest of the Football League over the next few weeks and months, but tonight we continue with Crystal Palace and we have six matches from the years between 1971 and 1990. The first match is from November 1971, and is a home match at Selhurst Park against Manchester United. By 1976, the club was in the Third Division and our second match is from the clubs FA Cup run of that year, a trip to Elland Road to play Leeds United in the Fourth Round of the competition. Next up is a match from the 1972/73 season against Chelsea at Selhurst Park. Our fourth match is from October 1978, and is a home match in the Second Division against Brighton & Hove Albion from a season during which these two rivals battled it out for the division championship. We then have one match from the 1980s, a home league match against Wolverhampton Wanderers from the 1982/83 season, and finally the 1990 FA Cup semi-final match at Villa Park against Liverpool. You can follow Twohundredpercent on Twitter by clicking...

We’ve been here before, of course. The news that the Football Association has decided to jettison Umbro as the manufacturers of the England national teams kit in favour of the brand that owns it, Nike, has been a long time coming and should be no great surprise to many seasoned kit-watchers. Although much has been of the tradition and apparent permanence of this particular contract, this is not even the first time that Umbro has been replaced as the England kit manufacturer since football shirts started to become adorned with manufacturers logos in the middle of the 1970s. Umbro have flirted with – and entered into a more committed relationship with – the England national team since the early 1950s. They took on the job from a little known company called St Blair in 1954 before losing the contract to Bukta in 1961. That they should have won it back for the start of the 1965/66 season may well, however, be the single biggest contributing factor behind why they have kept the contract for most of the previous three decades. The simple, elegant designs used by the England team between 1965 and 1974 are considered by some to be a high point in the history of the design of football kits, but when the national team failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup finals, a clean sweep at...